HUNTSVILLE — Ten years ago Houston killer Eric Cathey participated in the most daring attempted escape from Texas' death row in more than 60 years. He never got past the second fence.

On Tuesday afternoon, Cathey did much better — getting a stay from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals less than four hours before he was to be executed for the 1995 kidnapping-murder of Christina Castillo.

The court remanded Cathey's appeal to a lower court for a hearing on his claim that he is mentally retarded.

Cathey, 37, would have been the 18th to be executed in Texas this year.

A former Houston mechanic and security guard, Cathey was sentenced to die for the murder of Castillo, whose decayed body was discovered near railroad tracks in northeast Houston.

Testimony in his trial indicated he was the ringleader of five young men who abducted the woman in an effort to rob her and her boyfriend of drugs and cash.

Despite being beaten and kicked, Castillo insisted she knew nothing of the drugs. Cathey then bound her with tape and shot her in the head three times.

Lionel Bonner, one of Cathey's accomplices, testified against him and is serving a 30-year sentence for aggravated kidnapping.

In his petition to the appeals court, Cathey argued that executing a mentally retarded inmate would violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Secondly, he argued that his right to due process would be violated unless a hearing were held to weigh his claim of being mentally retarded.

On Thanksgiving 1998, Cathey was one of seven death row inmates who attempted to escape from the old Ellis Unit near Riverside. Only Corpus Christi killer Martin Gurule escaped. He was found drowned in a nearby creek less than a week later.

The other would-be escapees were apprehended before they left the prison. Cathey surrendered to armed guards after he reached the top of the second prison fence.

The attempt, the first in Texas since the 1930s, brought wide-ranging changes to the way condemned killers are managed.

Death row was moved from Ellis to the state-of-the-art Polunsky Unit in Livingston. Work details for capital killers — thought to be the means by which the would-be escapees conspired — were eliminated.

In addition, killers are now housed in single-occupancy cells and their interaction with other inmates was eliminated.

In a death row interview just weeks before his scheduled execution, Cathey insisted that he was innocent of the crime. He contended that at the time Castillo was killed, he was watching television with his girlfriend.